TrackPerformer provides a visual stage for your music, using HTML5 canvas and audio. On that stage, performers “play” the instruments in the music visually. In other words, it’s a visualisation system for music, but based on the notation (the abstract) rather than the audio (the manifestation).
Essentially, you take a piece of music, convert it into a format that TrackPerformer understands (JSON), describe how you want it to be performed, and then watch! You can, of course, write your own performers.
Before going any further, let’s
see it in action. The music is “Colony”, a new piece that I wrote about a week ago.
Note: You won’t be able to view the performance linked above in Internet Explorer, due to its over-aggressive script-blocking: the scripts served from GitHub have the wrong mime-type, so IE won’t let them run.
Take a look at the project on GitHub to see how it all fits together. TrackPerformer itself resides in the “Source” directory; in “Examples”, you’ll find the performance of Colony; in “Utilities”, there’s a JavaScript macro for Komodo IDE/Edit that will help you to translate copied-and-pasted OpenMPT pattern data into TrackPerformer’s JSON format.
You can find more information on the TrackPerformer wiki, including an outline of the format, and some basic instructions for getting started. I’ll be adding more information to the wiki over the next few days, and I’ll post updates here too.
Let me know what you think!
I’ve been meaning to write a piece in this idiom for years. It’s an industrial/orchestral hybrid. I don’t know why, but I always find this style of music fun, notwithstanding its occasional heaviness.
More of the usual Native Instruments suspects at play in this piece: Kontakt, Massive, FM8, and Battery. All of them driven by OpenMPT and Xlutop Chainer.
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(Download)
Conflagration by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
A piece in the same vein as Fluorescent. My wife describes this piece as “dystopian”. I, of course, had to reply with this rather witty riposte: “Dystopia? I ’ardly even know ’er!”.
This piece is somewhat heavier than some of my other recent endeavours, but hopefully not too much so. In terms of VSTis, it makes use of the usual culprits: Reaktor, Massive, FM8, and Kontakt.
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(Download)
Juggernaut by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
So I’ve been playing a bit of Unreal Tournament 3 of late, and UT3 happens to have a pretty awesome demoscene-inspired soundtrack. I guess it was inevitable that I should would go down that path as well! This piece is the result. It gave me the chance to dust off some of my less-often-used VSTis; Reaktor, Absynth and Battery all get a look-in on this track.
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(Download)
Fluorescent by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.